Thirty years ago, in a lecture at the Radcliffe Institute, Tillie Olsen first addressed the problem of silences in literature--paving the way for future explorations of the subject, including her landmark work, Silences. The subject of silences and silencing--as fact, as trope, as lens through which to understand literary history--has been central to feminist criticism ever since.
In Listening to Silences, a group of distinguished feminist literary critics reevaluates Olsen's heritage to reassert, extend, redefine, and question her insights, and to probe the dynamics of...

Published in 1884, Huck Finn has become one of the most widely taught novels in American curricula. But where did Huckleberry Finn come from, and what made it so distinctive? Shelley Fisher Fishkin suggests that in Huckleberry Finn, more than in any other work, Mark Twain let African-American voices, language, and rhetorical traditions play a major role in the creation of his art.
In Was Huck Black?, Fishkin combines close readings of published and unpublished writing by Twain with intensive biographical and historical research and insights gleaned from linguistics, literary theory, and...

When Tom Gosset's Race: The History of an Idea in America appeared more than a generation ago, it explored the impact of race theory on literature in a way that anticipated the entire current scholarly discourse on the subject. Though it has gone out of print, it has never been rendered obsolete. Its reprinting is a boon to younger scholars in particular who are unfamiliar with its rich presentation of fact and its clear, efficient analysis, from which so much later theorizing has developed. With a new afterword by and about the author, and an introduction by series editors Arnold...

Mark Twain has been called the American Cervantes, our Homer, our Tolstoy, our Shakespeare. Ernest Hemingway maintained that "all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn." President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took the phrase "New Deal" from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Twain's Gilded Age gave an entire era its name. Twain is everywhere--in ads for Bass Ale, in episodes of "Star Trek," as a greeter in Nevada's Silver Legacy casino. Clearly, the reports of his death have been greatly exaggerated. In Lighting Out for the Territory,...

Mark Twain (born Samuel Clemens), a former printer's apprentice, journalist, steamboat pilot, and miner, remains to this day one of the most enduring and beloved of America's great writers. Combining cultural criticism with historical scholarship, A Historical Guide to Mark Twain addresses a wide range of topics relevant to Twain's work, including religion, commerce, race, gender, social class, and imperialism. Like all of the Historical Guides to American Authors, this volume includes an introduction, a brief biography, a bibliographic essay, and an illustrated chronology of the...

Walt Whitman spent twenty-five years as a journalist before he published his first book of poems. Mark Twain pursued a twenty-year career as a journalist before the publication of his first novel. The list of great imaginative writers whose careers began in journalism includes not only Whitman and Twain, but also Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos, among others.
Fishkin's book--the first full-length study to examine this tradition in American letters--focuses on the lives and careers of Whitman, Twain, Dreiser, Hemingway, and Dos Passos, in order to discover the roots...

In this work Jewish-American scholars share their reflections on the interconnectedness of identities and ideas. They examine how their Jewishness has shaped and influenced their intellectual endeavours, and how their intellectual work has developed their sense of themselves as Jews.

The University of California Press is delighted to announce the new publication of this three-act play by one of America's most important and well-loved writers. A highly entertaining comedy that has never appeared in print or on stage, Is He Dead? is finally available to the wide audience Mark Twain wished it to reach. Written in 1898 in Vienna as Twain emerged from one of the deepest depressions of his life, the play shows its author's superb gift for humor operating at its most energetic. The text of Is He Dead?, based on the manuscript in the Mark Twain Papers, appears here...

Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872 1906) overcame racism and poverty to become one of the best-known authors in America, and the first African American to earn a living from his poetry, fiction, drama, journalism, and lectures. This original collection includes the short novel The Sport of the Gods, Dunbar s essential essays and short stories, and his finest poems, such as Sympathy, all which explore crucial social, political, and humanistic issues at the dawn of the twentieth century."

The Encyclopedia of Civil Rights in America is a comprehensive reference source on the human rights and civil liberties that are legally recognized in the US. The US Consitution and the Bill of Rights define individual rights for Americans. The successive amendments to the Constitution and Supreme Court decisions further define these rights and relationships while protecting the individual citizen in an ever changing society. The Encyclopedia of Civil Rights in America presents students with lucid, enlightening essays on these fundamental documents, court decisions and laws, while examining...